Announcing the winner of the RocketNews24 Japan Wish competition!

We know you’ve kept you waiting, but it’s finally time to announce the winner of the RocketNews24 competition!

Join us after the jump to find out who we’ll be flying over to Japan to fulfil their Japan dream experience!

Back at the end of March we asked you to send in your one minute videos telling us the wishes you wanted to have granted in Japan. We here at the office were then faced with the extremely difficult task of looking through the many, many wonderful entries we had and whittling them down to just a few who would go through to the Skype interview round. Everyone who got through to this stage was a real pleasure to talk with and worthy of winning, but of course there could only be one person whose dream we could help make come true.

And that winner is… Ashley “Zayane” Lovings!

Ashley is a 26-year-old from the USA, and her wish involves traveling from Tokyo to Kyoto via the shinkansen to experience the famous Gion Matsuri, with a few other things along the way. She won us over with her enthusiasm, humor, and passion for enka music.

Here’s Ashley’s original entry video:

After finally deciding on her as our winner, we decided to surprise Ashley with the good news over Skype, under the guise that we needed to clarify a few things from the previous interview. Her reaction was absolutely priceless:

We can’t wait to bring Ashley over here and have her share her experience with our readers! Thank you again to everyone who took the time to enter. We’re sorry we couldn’t make more of your dreams come true, but we look forward to having many more opportunities to give back to our fabulous readers in the future.